A Decade of Blackberrys
PDAs: A Decade of Blackberrys
The BlackBerry was one of the first Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs released. It was developed by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian company. The first Blackberry was released in 1999 and was a initially a fairly simple two-way paging device.
It sold well, but didn’t become the incredibly popular “CrackBerry” (a play on words making fun of the apparent addiction of BlackBerry users) of today until 2002 when a new model of the Blackberry was released that supported phone, email, text messaging, web browsing and a number of other features. This propelled the Blackberry PDA to become one of the most popular digital devices today with users numbering in the tens of millions and growing.
The wireless gadget is considered indispensable to many in the business world. President Obama is a known hardcore Blackberry fan. Currently there are nearly 30 million BlackBerry subscribers, and the number continues to grow. The BlackBerry connect program allows non-BlackBerry devices to communicate with the BlackBerry network, so the reach of the handheld device is significantly longer than just subscribers.
The RIM continues to introduce new features for the BlackBerry and they are currently looking into integrating with Tivo to allow users to control their systems with their wireless device. Research in motion also allows third party software to be created for the BlackBerry, further increasing the functionality of the device.